Using a personal automobile for traveling to a destination instead of using public transportation provides convenience, ease of scheduling a trip, and an assurance of timely availability of the automobile for the return trip.
One of the challenges of using a personal automobile is finding an available parking space proximate to the destination. It is often very difficult to find a suitable street parking space in downtown areas, and to find a pay parking garage or parking lot proximate to the destination, a driver has to search driving in downtown traffic when she may have a time constraint as to her destination.
This situation applies whether the driver's destination is a business place down town or a sporting event where a large number of attendees are in search of a limited number of available parking spaces close to their destination. A similar problem also presents itself in parking lots in large universities or large corporations, where a driver needs to attend a class or a meeting starting at a specific time and all the proximate parking spaces are occupied and driver needs to drive through the parking lot to find an available parking space in a timely manner.
A driver can search on the internet and find the address to her destination along with the address to pay parking facilities proximate to her destination before she leaves. However even if the parking facilities provide updated information on availability of parking spaces on their lots, because there is a time lag between when she gets the information from the internet and when she arrives at the parking facility, the parking facility may be fully occupied, where the deriver will again faces the problem of finding an available parking space.
The process for finding an available parking space, usually results in driver's frustration, wasted driver's time, wasted gas or electricity by the automobile driving around in traffic looking for a parking space. In situations where the driver had not allowed for enough driving search time, a delay in finding a parking space will further result in the driver missing the start time of a business meeting, a class, an entertainment or sporting event.
A system that can provide real time information on available parking spaces proximate to the driver's destination will provide the driver with choices to decide where she can park to optimize the distance from the parking space to her destination and associated parking expenses.